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Comment by benkoller | Hacker News Reader

Great approach. I've been running ops teams for a long time, and eventually all teams have ended up spending some time optimising our CI tooling to involve some degree of caching - so you definitely are on to something.

Before I clicked your pricing I'd really wished for an affordable pricing plan to run this on BYO resources, but only your enterprise plan seems to cover this. I always get an iffy feeling when I have to build my software on external resources I have 0 control over. Your downtime will prevent teams from shipping their code - but I guess that thought is part of your upsell to the enterprise plan.

Anyway, it's one of these ideas I'd wish I had years ago, so congratz to you.

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BYO resources for CI sounds good in theory, but considering costs it's almost always a worse proposition:

- 10 hours / month of maintenance + 200 hours of setup @ $60/hr = $13k in the first year, not including any infrastructure costs.

If you just redirected that money to a hosted offering you'd get significantly more powerful servers without needing to allocate engineering / management resources - it also makes it significantly easier to push updates & monitor uptime on the host's end.

Even traditionally hosted tools like Atlassian's suite are moving to cloud for the same reason: https://www.atlassian.com/migration/journey-to-cloud

While this is likely true in many cases I'm in a very sensitive industry (banking) and we tend to self host things not for cost reasons but for security reasons. We spend a lot of time going through pen tests, getting SOC2 compliance, etc.

Handing off something this critical can cause an even more painful audit in many cases so just a thought to consider cost is sometimes not the only factor.

Looks like a really cool product though!

We're actually in the process of getting SOC2 and pen tests ourselves - another benefit of a hosted offering is it can (eventually) integrate into your compliance system (e.g., vanta)

A lot of our customers are in fintech (payroll, banking, etc) so we've spent a lot of effort on our security model: https://layerci.com/security

Not in banking industry but startup I'm working with is in the middle of getting SOC2 compliance.

Any pointers I should consider on engineering side?

> - 10 hours / month of maintenance + 200 hours of setup @ $60/hr = $13k in the first year, not including any infrastructure costs.

Impressive numbers! would love to do these for you for a tenth of the price you are quoting, I'd still get like a 400% margin or something. GitLab runner is just installing the package with apt and running the register command once, then updating just magically happens when you upgrade the system.

As for infrastructure, you will find dedicated servers that will perform extremely well for an equivalent 49$/mo/developer.

The type of CI you're describing would be in the "simple" category in the OP - if your goal is just "run a single docker build and check if it fails" there are lots of free hosted tools you can set up (github actions, gitlab CI, etc)

There is in fact a burgeoning industry of devops consultants that set up CI pipelines for companies, I'd encourage you to consider it if you like the work!

Actually we do, looking for more projects!

Will let you know if we know anyone that's looking for a consultant - do you have a website I could refer folks to?

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